London

I arrived in London this morning. Great to be in a place so crowded, with so many people. I don’t really know any Londoners (the two people I do know are an American and an Australian), so I can’t yet comment about them, but the density of crowds and the life of the streets is exhilarating.

I arrived in London this morning. Great to be in a place so crowded, with so many people. I don’t really know any Londoners (the two people I do know are an American and an Australian), so I can’t yet comment about them, but the density of crowds and the life of the streets is exhilarating.

9 thoughts on “London”

heh, I lived there for a year and I’m not sure I met any Londoners… Certainly not as friends, they aren’t the friendliest bunch. On top the NY style creative immigrant thing and traditional immigrant thing its also got 100,000 Australians paused temporarily en midst of their world tours. A big time parallel city. And unlike say NY or SF where the parallel city is mostly centralized (no hipsters in the Bronx), the low lying architecture of London sends the parallel city sprawling out in every direction. That said, the center does still have a greater gravitational pull on the creative immigrant, then it does on traditional immigrants or the natives, assuming they actually exist…

Londoners ARE friendly! You just have to find the right ones to talk to. Remember that people in general can be a pain, so it’s just wading through the sludge of humanity to get to the good people. I’ve found that to be pretty much the same wherever I go.

Upon reading about Venus in Exile (2001) and The Mechanical Bride (1951), it occured to me that beauty (simple beauty, as in a beautiful woman or man, or a beautiful landscape) had to go somewhere when, during the 1900s, it was banned from the visual arts. The human need for beauty wants to be satisfied and beauty needed a new place to reside. It also needed new patrons, or sponsors as they are called today. Beauty found its new home in consumer culture and cinema, and its new sponsors in Hollywood and the marketing and advertising divisions of consumer good manufacturers.

To summarize:

If – in the 20th century – beauty was exiled from the arts, it found refuge in advertising, fashion, cinema, product design and consumer culture.

Jan, I largely agree with you, though I think there is more to it as well, since today modernist ideals have been surpassed, and art itself has come to take refuge, as it were, in advertising, fashion, etc.

In London I was surprised at how ugly everybody looked. Just outside of London people looked healthy, but inside of London itself people seemed to be quite weary and washed out looking.

If you saw someone healthy they were always from somewhere else.

But I still thought London was the most elegant place in the Anglophone world (I haven’t been to South Africa or to Australia or even much of Canada though). I loved the feeling that you wouldn’t get shot. I guess you can still get blown up by bombs, though. Are you home safe now in Detroit?